Save Money Purchasing?

Oh Rahm, you are so simple sometimes:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel has hired an outside accounting firm to streamline the City of Chicago’s procurement and contracting process, in what he hopes will save tens of millions of dollars.

  With a Southwest Side city workshop as a backdrop, Mayor Emanuel announced that the firm Accenture will conduct a complete evaluation of the city’s procurement services, and he says the company predicts it will find at least $25 million in savings.

• “While Accenture will go through all the contracts, help us vote on the consolidation, and find efficiencies and savings, they do not get paid because they identify the savings,” he said. “They do not see any value until the taxpayers see value.”

  That means if the city saves $25 million or more, then Accenture will receive up to 10 percent of that savings.

Here's a question - how did Rahm get Accenture to agree to only $2.5 million (10% of the savings)? Because we could go through the budget tomorrow and find easily double that inside of a few hours. City procurement is among the most corrupt and bloated of services. Too much of it is laden with "mark-ups" for connected vendors and specialty suppliers. We've given examples before:

• Let's say you need a length of chain to secure a fence. You can't just go to Home Depot and get three feet of chain for $10. You have to draw up a proposal, submit it (sometimes twice), get an "approved" vendor (many times a storefront operation) to agree to supply the chain, get their fee added in (this layer can be larger than just one company by the way), then they run out to Home Depot and buy the chain for $10 while charging the city $15 or $20 - sometimes a lot more.

It goes this way for all procurement. Chains, light bulbs, paint, even dog food for K9. There are dozens of "approved vendors" who have storefront offices,a telephone answering service and nothing else at all. They have no warehouses, no supply chain, no assets whatsoever except for a connection to City Hall, or in many cases, a church. It's such a fertile ground for an investigative reporter to make a name for themselves that we're surprised it hasn't been explored before. Or it has been and the editors refuse to let the story run lest they offend certain people.